12 Years a Slave

Steve McQueen · 2013 CE · Film · Modern / American · Contemporary

A free Black violinist with a wife and children in Saratoga takes a two-week engagement with two men who admire his playing, wakes in irons in a cell within sight of the Capitol, and is shipped south under another man's name. Twelve years pass on Louisiana plantations where saying who he is would cost him his life. From Solomon Northup's 1853 memoir, which this archive does not hold.

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